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Iconfusion is a mental health condition that is manifested as temporary confusion and disorientation as the result of adding a new app to your phone and the subsequent relocation of the icons for existing apps that you use on a regular basis.

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A student in one of my introductory computer applications classes asked how she could learn more advanced functionality in the Microsoft Office while continuing to deal with working and going to school. I pointed her at the repository of all knowledge, YouTube. There are many professional software instructors and instruction organizations out there. Many of them offer a select number of high-quality lessons for free. Some do it out of a sense of community, others, with the hope of having you purchase their products. When you put all of these free offerings together as samples in the world’s biggest mall, you are bound to get a complete set. Nonetheless, you can be the beneficiary. Here is a simple two step process that works for just about anything in the Microsoft Office.

With all of the whining going on about carbon emissions, I decided to do some research in ways to get the carbon out of the air. A single device powered by a coal-energy plant would remove ten times the amount of energy needed to run it. The device in this article was created over 5 years ago. Imagine the improvement in the technology and drop in the costs to produce it.

The bargaining game of analyst estimates and PM timelines is key to an analyst’s success. The analyst typically asks for too much, the PM offers too little, and they meet somewhere in the midst. The best example of how the analyst wins at this game is seen in the rare crossing of the original Star Trek engineer, James Montgomery Scott, a/k/a Scottie, and the Star Trek, The Next Generation (TNG) engineer Geordi LaForge. Scotty locked himself in a transporter buffer loop thus allowing himself to exist as unaging demarterialized energy. The Enterprise’s crew figured out how to release Scotty from the buffer. As a result, there were two chief engineers on deck. Scotty was the old salty dog who always said things couldn’t be done and then did them. La Forge was a younger, more idealistic, by-the-rules engineer. The following dialog took place in a scene where Captain Picard (the captain of the TNG Enterprise) had given La Forge an order to produce some critical analysis.
LA FORGE: Yeah, well, I told the Captain I’d have this analysis done in an hour.
SCOTTY: How long will it really take?
LA FORGE: An hour!
SCOTTY: Oh, you didn’t tell him how long it would *really* take, did ya?
LA FORGE: Well, of course I did.
SCOTTY: Oh, laddie. You’ve got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.

You see, everything I ever learned about systems analysis negotiation, I learned from Star Trek. We may have been considered nerds when we were young, but we make more money than the cool guys ever will.

Many organizations purchase expensive enterprise software packages only to find they aren’t adding any value to the organization. These organizations tend to operate under the false assumption that the package will take care of their needs. They need to bear this fact in mind; a package without a purpose and a plan is useless.